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Photo by Pieter M. van Hattem

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her latest book is Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins, 2017). Her six previous books–including Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation;How to Become A Scandal; Against Love: A Polemic; The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability-have been translated into fifteen languages. Kipnis is a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking, has taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan, and been a visiting professor at NYU, Columbia University School of the Arts, University of British Columbia, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo; and published essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s,Atlantic,Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and Bookforum. Her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” was included in The Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. Kipnis has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program. She lives in New York and Chicago.